One of the people who was involved in the Milgram experiment wrote his own story.
In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine.
I have long been of the opinion that the American culture of tipping is somewhat barbaric but now I have an answer to those who say that tipping encourages good service.
Go spend a week in Tokyo and a week in New York and then tell me which one has the better service.
Even the immigrations and customs people at Narita polite and helpful.
Next time I run into Obama at one of his rallies, I’ll encourage him to issue this as his first Executive Order:
All persons intending to work in a customer-facing role are required to spend six months in Japan for on the job training.
Oh. And they’ll also be required to say -imas after every third word.
[I wrote this months ago. Posting it now (unfinished) to clear out my backlog - ed]
A little while ago, a bunch of us went to see Nick Yee give a presentation about Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) at PARC. Over a beer afterwards, we discussed one of my favourite MMO topics and were neatly divided down the middle on the subject.
The topic concerns bad behaviour by other players in the game and what the developers should do about it. The bad behaviour in question might be stealing or killing or scamming or any number of other things that would annoy other players. But not cheating. We are all agreed that cheating - causing lag to gain an advantage in the fight, using a bug or exploit to create gold or any number of other ways of gaming the system - sucks.
One side, who happen to play rather a lot of MMOs, said that it is the developer’s responsibility to prevent such bad behaviour. The other side, who don’t play so much any more and includes me, claim that the developers should enable the other players to prevent such behaviour.
Broadly speaking, the first group want to narrow the rules of the game to make bad behaviour impossible. The second group want to expand the rules of the game so the players can create their own systems of justice - their own rules, ther own morality - within the game. Martin Fowler calls these attitudes enabling attitudes and directing attitudes.
The ones who play might claim (and do claim) that they have won the argument by the very fact that they play the games in question - but there is a self-fullfilling prophesy at work. The games are targetted at a particular market and those outside the market simply stop playing.
Still waiting for Jeff’s philosopher to give me some context for my musings on morality, but while we wait…
I just subscribed to The Mouse Trap, a blog about evolutionary psychology. Today’s entry was about moral dilemmas and moral development with a link to a discussion of Kohlberg’s Moral Stages. Kohlberg proposed that there are 5 (or maybe 6 stages) in a child’s moral development and crafted a test to determine the particular stage that a child is at by posing moral dilemmas such as this one…
In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19)
…and seeing how the child reasons about the dilemma. The subject is then graded into one of the stages summarized below:
At stage 1 children think of what is right as that which authority says is right. Doing the right thing is obeying authority and avoiding punishment. At stage 2, children are no longer so impressed by any single authority; they see that there are different sides to any issue. Since everything is relative, one is free to pursue one’s own interests, although it is often useful to make deals and exchange favors with others.
At stages 3 and 4, young people think as members of the conventional society with its values, norms, and expectations. At stage 3, they emphasize being a good person, which basically means having helpful motives toward people close to one At stage 4, the concern shifts toward obeying laws to maintain society as a whole.
At stages 5 and 6 people are less concerned with maintaining society for it own sake, and more concerned with the principles and values that make for a good society. At stage 5 they emphasize basic rights and the democratic processes that give everyone a say, and at stage 6 they define the principles by which agreement will be most just.
Read the article (it’s an easy read) to get the full scoop especially if you want to argue with me in the comments 
It occurred to me that the stages seem to oscillate between simplistic versions of liberal and conservative thinking (approximately, conservative, liberal, liberal, conservative) until stage 5/6 when a more abstract reasoning kicks in. Kohlberg claims that there is a natural progression along the stages and, although children do not skip stages, they can be helped through the stages by education and might get stuck at a stage if their education is incomplete.
Revisiting Rob’s Barefoot Dilemma in the context of Kohlberg’s stages, we might decide that rules are appropriate for very young (stage 1) children but that our goal should be to educate the child by providing different reasoning at each stage of moral development.
The goal for a healthy society would be to get everyone to stage 5 by the end of their education. This would allow us to prune back the overgrown Statute Book to remove all those laws rendered unnecessary in a moral society. The only laws left would be the ones that either
Perhaps there could be different sets of laws for people at different stages of moral development (as there are now) but people would have to demonstrate the appropriate level of moral maturity before they could step up a level? The whole system would be administered by philosophers of course.
Morals are the rules that we follow when there are no rules and no one is watching.
Corollary
When we create laws to prevent immoral behavior, we make society less moral.
Citations
In the old days, you used to have to do tons of research - read books and do studies and stuff - before making claims like this. Now you can just stick it on your blog and someone will come along and say “that sounds just like what that famous philosopher said in his second book”. If only I knew someone who lived next to a philosopher, he could ask him.
Andrew Sullivan just watched A Man for all Seasons which tells the tale of Thomas More’s struggles with Henry VIII over the relationship between religion, the law and executive power.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man’s laws, not God’s - and if you cut them down - and you’re just the man to do it - d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
I have the DVD at home. Need to watch it again.
